I certainly do not mean that the psychologist ought to mix the records
of his instruments with the demands of his speculations, and that he
may seek help from the Absolute when the figures of the chronoscope
or the curves of the kymograph are doubtful. Experimental psychology
is certainly to-day and will be for all future an independent exact
discipline with its own problems and methods. No one can insist more
earnestly than I do on the demarcation line between the empirical study
of mental phenomena and the logical enquiry into the values of life.
Yet I deny that it is a personal idiosyncrasy of mine to try to combine
vivid interest in both. There is no antagonism between them; a man may
love both his mother and his bride. I am devoted to philosophy, just
as I love my native country; and I am devoted to psychology, just as I
love the country in which I do my daily work; I feel sure there is no
reason for any friction between them.
Of course, on the surface a psychological laboratory has much more
likeness to the workshop of the physicist. But that has to do with
externalities only. The psychologist and the physicist alike use subtle
instruments, need dark rooms and sound-proof rooms, and are spun
into a web of electric wires. And yet the physicist has never done
anything else than to measure his objects, while I feel sure that no
psychologist has ever measured a psychical state. Psychical states are
not quantities, and every so-called measurement thereof refers merely
to their physical accompaniments and conditions. The world of mental
phenomena is a world of qualities, in which one is never a multiple of
the other, and the deepest tendencies of physics and psychology are
thus utterly divergent.
The complicated apparatus is therefore not an essential for
the psychologist. Of course, we shall use every corner of our
twenty-four laboratory-rooms upstairs, and every instrument in the
new cases--and yet much of our most interesting work is done without
any paraphernalia. Three of the doctor-dissertations which our
psychological laboratory completed last year consisted of original
research in which no instruments were involved; they dealt with
memory-images, with associations, with æsthetic feeling, and so
on. Yes, when, a short time ago, a Western university asked me how
much it would cost to introduce a good practical training-course in
experimental psychology, I replied that it would cost them the salary
of a really good psychologist, and besides, perhaps, one dollar for
cardboard, strings, rulers, colored paper, wire, and similar fancy
articles at five cents apiece.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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